Hello from Villarrica, where I am taking care of a lot of business. I haven’t written for a while – here’s what I’ve been doing.

 

At the end of December I finished the first session of the English class. The second to last class I learned two lessons. We had an excellent class, the last review before the final. It was going real well, and I didn’t want to stop class. I’ve complained before, because teachers cancel class for here for a little drizzle, but I’ll tell you, this time, I should have ended class early. It started raining, and I mean RAINING HARD, in the middle of class. By the time class was out it was monsoon-like conditions. Nothing bad happened except for a lot of soaked students, but it was not weather in which anybody should have been outside, and it was my fault that a lot of people were.

 

In order to get into the classroom that day, I had borrowed the key from Nelson. He was on the construction crew building the new classroom (this is the same man I wrote about before who won the Human Being Race). I told him that I would bring it by his house after I was done with class. That afternoon I had been unable to procure the other key from the school principal, who was in Villarrica at the time.

 

On the way home from class, absolutely and utterly soaked, I stopped in Despensa Central, the store of my friend Nilda. She was there with Celia and some other people. I told them that I had to go return the key to Nelson. Celia said, no, no, it’s too wet. Give it to me, I’ll call him and he can come by here tomorrow.

 

Are you sure? I asked.

 

Absolutely, she said. No problem. Don’t worry about this at all. I’ll go tell Nelson right now.

 

I gave her the key.

 

The next morning, at 5am, I was woken by Nelson, at the foot of my bed, who was politely demanding the key. I sent him to Celia, who had neglected to let him let him know that she had the key.

 

So I learned these two things:

 

Actually, an article I read by Isabel Hilton called “The General” put my key problems in perspective. It was written in 1990, and it is about General Alfredo Stroessner. It includes an interview with the man, conducted in Brazil. Hilton claims that in 1989, when General Rodriguez conducted the coup which overthrew the 35 year Stroessner dictatorship, Stroessner himself had a key problem. There was a tank that Stroessner had available to defend the Palace from coup attempts. But on the day of the coup it could not be utilized because the man who had the key was out of town. (Stroessner himself was away from the Presidential Palace, visiting his mistress.)

 

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It’s too hot here. That torrential rain I just described was the last real rain we’ve had, and ever since every day has been over 100 degrees. The heat induces lethargy. I’ve been trying to overcome this lethargy by helping the people at Don Hermes’ store load and unload bricks from trucks. I’ve been learning good brick throwing techniques, but I have to be careful to protect my fingers. Ever since I began playing guitar, I have been quite sensitive to the fact that the only fingers I can afford to lose are the ring finger and pinky of my right hand. The rest are indispensable.

 

A couple days ago after unloading bricks, the guys loading bricks wanted to see the unicycle. So I brought out the unicycle, put on this Groucho Marx looking fake-face type thing I bought in Asuncion, and unicycled to the creek. The rest of the guys soon join me, and we were all jumping around in the water along with a lot of other teenage and pre-teenage boys in town. The kids kept yelling, “Sele!” and then they would jump on me. I didn’t enjoy the game of Sele very much, so I swam down the creek. I found some girls to talk to and ask about the game of Sele. It seems like it is similar to tag.

 

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Amanda came to visit for a couple weeks. She spent some time in Paso Yobai and then we traveled all over Paraguay.

 

While she was here we got a chance to talk with a family of farmers who live in the rural compania Oñandivepa. This family was one of the poorer families in the Paso Yobai district, lacking both electricity and running water, and living in a wood shack. Their neighbor was an old man who liked to talk, and so we talked to with him for a long time. He insisted that a certain type of tree exuded gold from its leaves.

 

The next day was Christmas. Amanda and I went to spend Christmas with my friends in the Benitez family, the family of Luis, Paraguay’s fastest man. Unfortunately it was a sad Christmas for them, because on Christmas Eve Luis’ aunt and little cousin were run over and killed by a speeding car after they came got off of a bus. The woman has nine surviving children, all of whom are now orphans.

 

Most of the family was out, but we talked with the family for a while, and they were quite welcoming, inviting us to eat sopa paraguaya and chipa guazu and drink clerico, a mildly alcoholic fruit drink traditionally served at Christmas time in Paraguay.

 

For the next week we traveled around southern Paraguay, visiting some of my Peace Corps friends. But first we spent a day hiking through the mountains (or hills is probably more accurate) of Ybytyruzu. We got to the Salto Suizo, a beautiful waterfall hidden in a small mountainous jungle surrounded by farms.

 

After that we visited Regina in Villarrica, who is thriving in her work with two cooperatives. She is in great spirits and she found herself a nice little house to rent. Then we visited Andy in rural Blas Garay. He lives in a tiny wooden shack with no electricity nor running water. There is a stagnant swamp just behind his house. His immediate neighbors are all chickens, goats and pigs.

 

The next stop was a visit to Emilia in the town of Juan L. Mallorquin, in Alto Parana. She’s doing real well there. When we got to Mallorquin, for reasons I no longer remember, she was under obligation to move frozen beef from a freezer at the top of the hill to a freezer a long way away near the highway at the bottom of the hill. Amanda and I helped her move the meat.

 

Both Emilia and Amanda are vegetarians, and I prefer not to eat meat, and would be a vegetarian if I didn’t live in Paraguay, where most people eat lots of meat. The three of us went down the street with heavy, frozen meat. Emilia had a bagful, and at first I tried to carry the other bag on my head. This worked, but not for long because my neck started to feel like it might break. (I try not to damage my neck too much because of its strategic position between my head and my body).

 

So I took one side and Amanda the other and we had to periodically switch sides. It was heavy, heavy meat.

 

After the town of Mallorquin, we got a chance to visit Ciudad de Este, a place that is unlike anywhere else in Paraguay. Formerly known as Ciudad Presidente Stroessner, this city is on the Paraguayan border with Brazil and near the border with Argentina. The central, downtown area on the border in many ways resembles Hong Kong. It is bustling with trade. There are giant crowded apartment buildings and buildings full of stores, many with Chinese names. The stores open early, and close early. They sell pretty much everything there, with an especially overwhelming number of stores selling electrical and computer equipment. Inside these stores you are more likely to hear Portuguese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese or Arabic than you are to hear Guaraní. Outside of the buildings full of stores are street after street full of venders in little stalls. One of the tallest apartment buildings in downtown Ciudad de Este has a large mosque jutting out from it.

 

After 5pm, the activity pretty much stops cold, and what is left on the streets is a thick layer of garbage, which garbage pickers then comb through.

 

At an Asian foods store, Amanda started talking to a kindly Japanese-Paraguayan woman from Itapua Department who gave us some dried fruits. She spoke Spanish, Guaraní and Japanese.

 

Ciudad de Este has some great Chinese restaurants, a fact that we took full advantage of. At Restaurant Hong Kong we talked some in Mandarin with the owner, and then he got out the Karaoke machine. He worked really hard singing love songs in Spanish through the thickest Chinese accent I have every heard used to convey the Spanish language. So we took turns singing.

 

Amanda and I joined up with Emilia and went to the Cataratas de Yguazu. I believe that after Angel Falls in Venezuela, these are the largest waterfalls in the world. They are massive, and beautiful. Around the falls is a whole elaborate tourist facility with walkways, stairs, a train, restaurants, boats and more. The falls are located on the border of Brazil and Argentina, but they are inside land that was taken from Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance. The Argentineans call the falls Iguazu, but the name comes from the Guaraní Yguazu, which means “big water”, probably the best description that can be given to these falls. So as far as I’m concerned the falls are Paraguayan.

 

After outing to the falls, Amanda and I headed south to visit my friend Walipe, a Peace Corps volunteer in Fram, Itapua state. Around half of the people in Fram are of Ukrainian ancestory, and Walipe grew up in Mecca in Saudi Arabia, has lived in Boston and Columbia, Missouri, and has duel American-Saudi citizenship. Just your ordinary Meccan sent to by the United States government to work with Ukrainian-Paraguayans.

 

Since Walipe is one of the most energetic, positive and hard working people I’ve ever met, it did not surprise me that he’s got a lot of good things going on in Fram. One of the most significant things is what he’s done with the Framanian Casa de Cultura. This structure was a museum, but Fram’s Municipality neglected it for years. Walipe has converted the downstairs to a useable classroom and community center. He has converted the upstairs to his home. This process took a huge amount of work cleaning up bat shit that used to own the entire building and now only controls two rooms. What’s left of the museum, Walipe is cataloging and recreating. He’s teaching chess and English, and learning guitar and violin.

 

We spent new years with him, his brother Turkey who is visiting from Saudi, and a family he has befriended in Fram. This family cooked for New Year’s dinner a huge fish from the Parana River. They covered the fish in tomato sauce and cheese and cooked it.

 

We also visited the beautiful Framanian Eastern Orthodox Church right before midnight. It is a church which would not look out of place in Odessa, but it’s a little surreal to see standing in Paraguay, full of tall, pale, blond Ukrainian-Paraguayans. 

 

After that we visited my friend Leo in San Juan Bautista de Missiones. He’s working with a mayor who has one of the most successful, fiscally transparent and well-functioning municipal administrations in all of Paraguay. This mayor also has an air about him that reminds me of a mafia Godfather. After talking to the mayor for a while he gave me some information on social pharmacies, which has proven useful as a committee in Paso Yobai is beginning to process of setting up such a pharmacy.

 

After that, we went to Asuncion, where Amanda had to be to catch a bus to Buenos Aires.

 

For some reason, the head of Peace Corps Paraguay, Michael Eshleman, wanted to see my site immediately after I got back from vacation, so I told him that was fine as long as he gave me a ride from Asuncion to Paso Yobai, which he did. I believe the visit went well.

 

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The minute I started working again at the Municipality Mauda had a problem with the Mail Merge system I had set up for creating letters of recognition for committees. (In the last week about ten different sugar-farmer committees have formed in the district). I fixed the provlem and we decided to move the computers so that the one in Spanish was the one that most people used. This makes sense since I’m the only person at the Muni who understands English. So I moved the CPUs and left everything else in place, and hooked everything back up again. Then I was told that that is no good because there would be a problem if the Governor’s office saw that there was a computer not attached to its proper monitor. So I moved the monitors too. Then I was told that the computer from the Governor’s office would have to be on the table donated from the governor’s office. So we had to remove everything from the table, and the desk in the tiny room where the other computer was, and move the table and desk. This was the hard part, because they were both heavy and it was hard to fit them into the doors.  But we managed it.

 

In the afternoon I played guitar with Rolando and his brother. While we were playing his brother and Arsenio went up to the roof with binoculars to look at girls walk down the street. We played guitar for a long time, and they were on the roof for a long time. When they came down they told us, “While you were wasting your time playing guitar, we saw a lot of girls walk by.” I told them that I they could go down to the street and talk to the girls, and then they wouldn’t need binoculars.

 

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I’ve spent the last few days putting up fliers at places of business to promote my next session of English classes. The putting up fliers takes up far more time than one might expect for two important reasons. One, it’s almost too hot to move. Two, it would be culturally unacceptable and rude to show up, put up a flier and just leave. So I end up spending a lot of time sitting, talking, and drinking terere.

 

Today I talked with Don Victor Caballero, who owns a store in Barrio Itaipu. He invited me to drink terere with him. He impressed me immediately by bringing up, in the context of Paso Yobai, the central issue facing humanity: our future, or lack thereof. If there is any hope for the future (a debatable subject), we are rapidly destroying it.

 

Paso Yobai is one of the last frontiers in the rape of planet Earth. Victor told be, reinforcing what I’ve heard from other’s, that when he arrived twenty years ago, most of Paso Yobai was virgin jungle, full of a wide range of wild animals and plants. The temperature was several degrees cooler and there was far more rain. The creek used to be much wider and deeper than it presently is. His prediction is that twenty years from now Paso Yobai will be a desert.

 

Paso Yobai is being rapidly deforested. There is no doubt that part of the problem is caused by the recent settling of small farmers, people who in most of Latin America would be called campesinos but here usually refer to themselves as agricultores (although sometimes they say campasinos). These people have come and cleared trees, built homes, and carved out their farms from the jungle. Often (not always) their farming methods are chemical intensive, and there are usually spaces of destroyed forest used to graze cattle.

 

Still, their effect on the land is not nearly as damaging as that the Brazilians and Germans who have bought up massive properties. Unlike the Paraguayan settlers, who came to the land to start a new life for themselves and their families, the Brazilians and Germans bought the land for the purpose of extracting as much wealth from it as quickly as they can. Every farm I’ve ever seen inhabited by Paraguayan agricultores contains pockets of virgin forest that they will not cut down, and has trees scattered thought their fields and around their homes.

 

In contrast, the largest nearby German hacienda, Naranjito, is practically devoid of trees. Where there used to be a jungle, now there are cows, cows and more cows. Hundreds of cows, no trees.

 

Another large nearby farm, owned by a German, is also devoid of trees, and covered with nothing but genetically engineered soybeans. I run past this field a few times a week.

 

Brazilians have set up timber operations. Everyday trucks emerge from the most remote regions of the district, where the Brazilians own the land, and rumble past my apartment, weighted down with large, dead tree-trunks. A couple days ago one went over some logs covering a water pipe, crushed one of the logs and damaged the water pipe.

 

These Germans and Brazilians are removing from the district of Paso Yobai far more than wood. They are removing moisture, they are removing cool air, and they are removing roots that hold in place the rich nutrients of the soil, the same rich soil which attracted Paraguayan farmers in the first place.

 

As the conditions for farming get more and more difficult, poor Paraguayan farmers will be forced to sell their land to large timber and cattle interests in order to survive. This in turn will make conditions even worse, forcing a new sell-off of land, until one day Paso Yobai has become a hot, dry, infertile desert, with scattered cows and little else.

 

Don Victor has been observing this process for twenty years, and he says that the solution is education. He told me that Paso Yobaienses need to be educated in ecology, and Paraguayans need to be instilled with more patriotism, and stop selling their land to foreigners who only want it for hyper-exploitation.

 

I think Don Victor might be exaggerating the usefulness of education. Like the Dollar, the Real and the Euro buy a lot of Guaraníes. So what is not a huge amount of money for a Brazilian or a German is a huge amount of money for a poor Paraguayan farmer. Brazilians routinely offer ten times as much money for a piece of land than another Paraguayan farmer would be able to pay. Is it realistic to expect that a poor Paraguayan farmer, who if he’s lucky may earn around $1500 a year, will refuse to sell when someone offers him $20,000 for his land? How much ecological and patriotic education would you need to overcome these economic dynamics?

 

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Yesterday I went running with Luis and Wildo. They are getting ready to run in a 10k race in Ciudad de Este in a couple weeks. Luis is working hard because he wants to win the race. Wildo is also working hard because he wants to be able to finish the race. I will go with them to run the race too. But I know I can’t win, and I run around 10k about 3 or 4 times a week with no problem. So luckily for me, there is no reason for me to work hard!